NEW YORK (AP) — Lizzy McAlpine is surrounded by music lately. She’s making her Broadway debut in a daring stage musical, and when she retreats to her dressing room, her personal songs demand consideration.
“When the inspiration hits, I’ve got to write. I’ve got to have a guitar there or else I’ll go crazy,” she says. “I just kind of have to wait for them. I can’t really force a song.”
The people-pop singer-songwriter is following-up final yr’s launch of her third album, “Older,” with a job in “Floyd Collins,” a musical about life, loss of life and fame. She calls it good timing.
“I was starting to feel like I wanted to do something new, and this kind of came at the perfect time. It’s the first and only Broadway show that I’ve ever auditioned for,” she says.
McAlpine has been constructing a sonic repute for uncooked, stripped-down tracks and intimate, deeply reflective lyrics. Her single “Ceilings” went viral on TikTok, and “Older” has been hailed by critics.
Broadway made sense for a girl who grew up watching exhibits in New York and who has an “ability to infuse each song with character, as if acting,” the AP stated in a evaluation of “Older.”
“I feel like all of my music has musical theater in it because I have loved theater for so long,” she says. “I saw my first Broadway show and I was like 8, and so, it just kind of seeps into my music whether I am conscious of it or not.”
‘In her own world’
“Floyd Collins,” which simply earned six Tony Award nominations, tells the story of a hapless explorer who will get himself trapped in a Kentucky collapse 1925, triggering the primary fashionable media frenzy. McAlpine performs Floyd Collins’ sister, a girl who would not slot in.
“She is strange, definitely, but it’s just because she’s in her own world, and she sees the world differently than everyone else. She sees the beauty in it. She’s like a sponge. She picks up everything that everyone is throwing out. She’s just different. Not necessarily in a bad way,” McAlpine says.
“It explores being a young woman in the 1920s and being misunderstood and not listened to and not heard, and that’s like been a theme in my life because I’m working in the music industry. I’m surrounded by men all the time.”
McAlpine, 25, did not know a lot about “Floyd Collins” — it deputed off-Broadway in 1996 — however was a fan of its composer and lyricist, Adam Guettel, who created “The Light in the Piazza,” one in all her favourite musicals.
“I saw his name and I was like, ‘Oh, I love him.’ So I listened to the cast recording on Spotify from the original production and immediately was just hooked,” she says. “It just sounded like nothing that was on Broadway now. It was just so unique, and I love that kind of stuff.”
Broadway lured her
McAlpine, who was raised in a suburb of Philadelphia and attended the Berklee Faculty of Music, did theater in highschool. Her grandparents would take her and her siblings to Broadway yearly, and her mother would sing “Wicked” within the automobile. In the course of the pandemic, she livestreamed Broadway covers on Instagram.
“She had a kind of unaffected directness and purity and honesty in how she approached the reading of the role, to say nothing of the singing,” says Tina Landau, who directed “Floyd Collins” in addition to equipped the ebook and a few lyrics.
“I really felt that there was something in how unfettered and organic and unadorned her approach to it was that was perfect for the character, because Nellie just speaks truth.”
McAlpine remembers seeing “My Fair Lady” on the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Middle — the identical theater she graces in “Floyd Collins.” “Sometimes I’m on stage and I’m just thinking about I was in the audience one time, and it is just so crazy.”
After the musical, she plans on one other album, and the music that is popping out has been touched by the present. “It feels like it’s becoming more complex because I’m singing these songs that are so complex every day,” she says. After that, she’s open to concepts, even to extra theater.
“It has to be the right thing. This felt like it came to me at the exact right time in my life, and this was the exact right show for me. And so, if something else comes along, it would have to be the exact set of circumstances.”
If that seems like a singer-songwriter who’s taking cost of her profession, McAlpine would agree. She’s finished, for instance, with an unhealthy tempo to her excursions.
“I’m finally at a place in my career where I can make decisions and do things that really align with myself. There was a while there before my last album where I was kind of just being pulled along, and I was just doing things because that’s how everyone does them,” she says.
“I feel like I am now more sure of myself, and I know what I have to do to make myself feel comfortable. Even if it’s outside of the norm or what other people do in the industry, I’m going to do it anyway.”
